University of Calgary Press
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SEXUALIZING POWER IN NATURALISM: THEODORE
DREISER AND FREDERICK PHILIP GROVE
by Irene Gammel
ISBN 978-1-55238-631-6
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10
Naturalism's Specula(riza)tion:
The ''Genius'
Just as the narrative voice in The Titan is openly complicitous with, and
seemingly seduced by, the speculator's principle of sexualized power,
The "Genius" (1915), published only one year after The Titan, echoes the
earlier novel's deliberate collapsing of the boundary between the naturalist expression of "hard facts" and the speculator's "fictitious" business dealings. In his autobiographical Kunstlerroman, Dreiser examines
his role as a naturalist writer in a modern consumer economy, tracing
his own professional career as an artist and his private odyssey as a
womanizer while detailing his mental breakdown and his traumatic
bodily failings in the thinly veiled persona of Eugene Witla. Perhaps it
was this autobiographical closeness, the blurring of the boundary between naturalist narrator and narrated object that created the problems
in composing this naturalist tale of the artist's crisis and recovery. Contemporary readers, led by H. L. Mencken, were quick to condemn the
novel as Dreiser at his worst: "The thing rambles, staggers, trips, heaves,
pitches, struggles, totters, wavers, halts, turns aside, trembles on the edge
173
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Sexualizing Power in Naturalism
of collapse."1 But in its very shiftiness, its many repetitions, contradictions, and slippages, The "Genius" also presents a kind of Lacanian discourse of the Other, a language of the subconscious that gives insights
into the repressed and silenced aspects of Dreiser's naturalism.
In his persona of Eugene Witla, Dreiser conceptualizes the modern
artist as a clever money-maker whose wish-fulfillment dream is best
encapsulated in his desire to imitate the success of the great American
businessmen: "Here were Jay Gould and Russell Sage and the Vanderbilts
and Morgan," Witla reflects when he arrives in New York and asks yearningly, "Would the city ever acclaim him as it did some?"2 When Witla
finally "makes it" as an artist, he finds his customers amongst businesses
and corporations: he is commissioned to decorate a great bank, as well
as public buildings in Washington. Dreiser conceptualizes this issue in
similar terms in the sketch of "Ellen Adams Wrynn," in A Gallery of Women
(1929), where a woman painter marks her first success as an artist by
having her daringly exotic Parisian scenes exhibited permanently on
four huge panels on one of the large department stores of Philadelphia.
Here, art is assigned the function of advertisement, and the boundary
between the consumption of art and that of other commodities becomes
erased. At the same time the panels are an advertisement for the artist
herself: "And each panel signed: Ellen Adams Wrynn,"3 thus turning
the artist's name into a representation of a capitalist success story, a
signifier of an artist who has "made it."
While Walter Benn Michaels has argued that for Dreiser's financier,
art is as speculative as the stock market, Rachel Bowlby has discussed
the artist in The "Genius" as a capitalist "adman" and "businessman"
who offers no resistance to capitalism whatsoever.4 Indeed, as early as
1896, in a newspaper article on "Genius and Matrimony," Dreiser presented a psychological profile of the artist that anticipated Cowperwood's
narcissistic principle of power: "But the artist, poor and proud, along
with his endowment of creative power, is furnished with an aggressive
egotism,"5 a principle suggestive of the speculator's "I satisfy myself."
1 Mencken 87.
2 Theodore Dreiser, The "Genius" (New York: John Lane, 1915) 101. All further references will appear in the text, abbreviated G.
3 A Gallery of Women, Vol. 1 (New York: Horace Liveright, 1929) 145.
4 See Michaels, "Dreiser's Financier," 294; Bowlby 118-33.
5 Theodore Dreiser, "Genius and Matrimony," Ev'ry Month 2 (1896): 5-6, rpt. in
Theodore Dreiser: A Selection of Uncollected Prose, ed. Donald Pizer (Detroit: Wayne
State UP, 1977) 54.
Naturalism's Specula(riza)tion: The "Genius"
175
Dreiser's naturalist aesthetics and ideology thus go counter to the grain
of the American literary tradition. Many nineteenth-century American
artists insisted on the arts as a realm of Gedankenfreiheit, as a space of
imaginative freedom, inevitably outside and deliberately on the margins of American societal conventions and constraints.6 Dreiser, in contrast, moves the arts into the economic centre, and with this shift the
arts become a field on which are played out the tensions and struggles
but also the seductive games of American capitalism. Indeed, the specific analogies Dreiser establishes between the naturalistic artist and the
capitalist speculator are not only deliberate, but expose the ideological
contradictions at the heart of his naturalism.
Naturalist fiction from the nineteenth century on articulated a commitment to social criticism in either overt or covert narrative forms. Yet
the naturalist genre simultaneously perpetuates narrative positions of
authority and power that echo in its very midst the (capitalist) tendency
towards monopolization and centralization that it often criticizes in its
thematics and structure. Although naturalist fiction frequently promotes
social change, as often it confirms the ideological assumptions that help
perpetuate a social and economic status quo. The working people in
naturalism often emerge as a proletarianized, animalized Other, as the
brute, the beast that can only be contained in acts of narrative exorcism,
as June Howard has argued. These contradictions at the heart of naturalism are best illustrated by Dreiser's (seemingly incongruous but always deliberate) analogies between the naturalist artist and the capitalist
speculator. A comparison of the Cowperwood trilogy and The "Genius"
reveals that many of Cowperwood's strategies of gaining and maintaining power correspond to the epistemological, aesthetic, and ideological
principles on which Dreiser's naturalism thrives.
To begin, in The Titan and The "Genius" the narrator's editorial voice
shares the speculator's curiosity in and access to a world of privileged and
complex knowledges; both the naturalist artist and the speculator are endowed with the ability to see ahead, to read what others are not able to
decipher, and to accumulate bodies of knowledge. Philippe Ramon's theory
emphasizes that naturalism's "stringing together descriptions like so many
sections in the 'store of human documents'" generates "places to show
off knowledge (of words and the world) and know-how (stylistic and
rhetorical), and which are all carried out euphorically in enthusiastic
lexical expansions."7 The male narrator in The Titan typifies this point,
6 See Poirier 5.
7 Hamon37,38.
176
Sexualizing Power in Naturalism
"showing off" his expertise by entering the complicated world of capitalist manipulation, mental games, and speculative manoeuvrings. Sidney
Roberts has noted that Yerkes's "bookkeeping methods and business tactics were so complicated that a clear account of how he captured control
of Chicago's street railways can scarcely be made."8 But by venturing
into the complicated network of transactions and revealing to the reader
Cowperwood's ingenious strategies of manipulation and financing, the
narrator-author also draws attention to his own "superior" insight into
such complicated procedures, presenting himself as the speculator's
double and rival, by gathering and accumulating hidden and technically sophisticated knowledges. Conversely, the narrator's ability to collect information about the speculator also makes him a potential
oppositional force, since it allows him to "specularize" and to define
Cowperwood. It is the narrator who exposes the speculator as a target
for attack by making his imaginary "body" of power visible for the reader.
But as a "producer" of bodies of knowledge and naturalist plots, the
authorial voice also reveals a slippery complicity with Cowperwood's
role. Analyzing the first volume of the trilogy, Walter Benn Michaels has
emphasized Cowperwood's fascination with "mental" facts, such as money,
stocks, and bonds, and his obvious dislike for tangibles: "The financier's
dislike of stability thus emerges even more explicitly as a distaste for [tangible] commodities."9 Michaels, though, conveniently limits his argument
to The Financier, where the speculator's love of "mental" manipulations
leads to his incarceration on a conviction of technical embezzlement. In
The Titan, in contrast, Cowperwood is not only "sick of the stockexchange" but, from a lover of "abstract" tradings, he turns into a
"builder" of tangibles and thus becomes a producer-figure who never
abandons his manipulative strategies. Thus the binary opposition
between the speculator's "fictitious dealings" and the producer's output of tangible commodities becomes blurred. Cowperwood's modernization of Chicago's street railway project entails the construction of
(hundreds of miles of) extension lines, equipment of the horse-drawn
streetcars with cable (and later with electricity), implementation of better cars, and improvement of the overall service for the customers. It is
these contributions to the growth of the city and its very tangible infrastructure that make Cowperwood a productive figure in the eyes of the
Chicagoan public.
8 Roberts 348.
9 Michaels, "Dreiser's Financier," 280.
Naturalism's Specula(riza)tion: The "Genius"
177
Dreiser presents the same blurring of boundaries between artistic production and clever salesmanship in The "Genius." Not only in the title
but also in his middle and first names - often abbreviated to "Gene" or
even "Geni" - Dreiser presents Eugene Tennyson Witla as a producerartist (> Latin gigno, genui, genitum = to beget, to bring forth, to produce), so that on the surface the novel appears to echo Emile Zola's
conception of the naturalist artist as a producer-figure:
Aujourd'hui, il nous faut produire et produire encore. C'est le labeur
d'un ouvrier qui doit gagner son pain, qui ne peut se retirer qu'apres
fortune faite. En outre, si 1'ecrivain s'arrete, le public 1'oublie; il est force
d'entasser volume sur volume, tout comme un ebeniste par exemple
entasse meuble sur meuble.10
Zola, then, identifies the naturalist writer as a producer-labourer, a skilled
craftsman, while Dreiser, in contrast, signals his reservations about such
an identification. As Amy Kaplan has pointed out, Dreiser "made an
effort to distinguish writing from labor," thus turning his back not only
on Zola but also on the American tradition represented by Edith Wharton
and William Dean Howells, who valued writing as productive work.
The idea of "making a splash, of promoting one's art" was more important for Dreiser than hard work, and "he also inverts a traditional causal
relation to show that labor itself did not generate recognition."11 What is
needed for the artist to become a popular success in a competitive
twentieth-century market economy is not only productive genius but
also the speculative genius of salesmanship.
Given this deliberate analogy between the artist and the speculator, it
should come as no surprise that naturalist creation (or production) is characterized by the same moral ambiguity that Cowperwood displays as a
"builder" of Chicago's traction system in The Titan. Contributing to the
construction of Chicago's infrastructure, Cowperwood's activities are interwoven with the speculator's mental manipulations. A whiz kid at making use of commodities already produced by others, Cowperwood
manages, for example, to lease for a nominal sum tunnels built years ago,
thus completing his street railway traction project without much effort.
Although this move is an ingeniously productive "recycling" of a commodity no longer used, which would otherwise go to waste, Cowperwood's
strategy is criticized by his Chicagoan opposition. If this criticism partly
10 Emile Zola, Le Roman experimental (1880; Paris: Gamier Flammarion, 1971), 203.
11 Amy Kaplan, The Social Construction of American Realism (1988; Chicago: U of Chicago
P, 1992) 116,128.
178
Sexualizing Power in Naturalism
reflects that the opposition has been outsmarted, it also highlights that
Cowperwood's use of the tunnel exposes the speculator's parasitic quality, based as it is on the clever exploitation of somebody else's "labour."
It is the same principle of "productive recycling" that characterizes
Dreiser's creative strategies as a naturalist writer. In his study on European naturalist fiction, David Baguley confirms that the typical strategy
of naturalist plot composition consists in recycling/offs divers, newspaper items, or extraliterary sources, so that the boundary between imaginative creation and parasitic appropriation, between fiction and
document, becomes blurred: "The journalistic chronique, conte, vignette,
the risque tale, accounts of domestic crimes, of incest and adultery, descriptions of oddities of human behaviour from the macabre to the titillating, formed a huge subliterary generic stock of anecdotes on which
naturalist fiction could draw and from which it is at times barely distinguishable" (NF 89). Heavily indebted to his collection, appropriation,
and imaginative transformation of facts and documents, of newspaper
articles, letters, personal stories, interviews, and autobiographies,
Dreiser's fiction has even been described by Simon During in terms of
"discursive cannibalization." During writes that "whole segments of his
private correspondence were absorbed into The Genius, for instance, almost without alteration. He plundered other 'creative' writers too, being repeatedly accused of plagiarism."12 While in The Titan, the boundary
between the traditionally "honest" producer and the morally tainted
speculator becomes blurred, Dreiser's own "production" of naturalist
fiction is fed by the speculator's principle of "parasitic" appropriation,
accumulation, and imaginative transformation. Just as Cowperwood
assimilates and reorganizes different street railway companies to absorb Chicago's traction system into a larger corporate company, so for
Dreiser writing partly was, as During has put it somewhat polemically,
"a form of cutting and pasting."
All of these analogies, intersections, and deliberate connections converge to expose the problematic ideological underpinnings that help
maintain the seductive power of both the artist and the capitalist speculator, a point highlighted in The "Genius," in the artist's relationship with
marginalized groups and women. Just as Cowperwood does not fight
against but appropriates the interests of the people to create his own success at the beginning of The Titan, so the naturalist painter Eugene Witla
turns to the working people as the subject matter of his art. "Creativity is
12 During 225.
Naturalism's Specula(riza)tion: The "Genius"
179
not open to the lower classes; and yet it is working-class life - cities, factories, street scenes - which the modern artist takes as his subject matter,"
Rachel Bowlby observes in her discussion of The "Genius" and continues:
"The artist's prospecting seems in one way to resemble the customary
exploitation of 'millions of people' for the individualist end of capitalism."13 Indeed, Witla shocks the bourgeois public in his first important
exhibition with his painting of a black garbage collector, a painting that
is selected by the narrator as an example of Witla's social engagement.
Yet Witla's interest in the marginalized figures of America's urban slums
simultaneously echoes Cowperwood's dubious alliance with the democratic movement in the beginning of The Titan. In both cases, the lower
classes are only tools that help create the speculator-artist's own success.
The "Genius" reveals how the authorial voice's overt commitment to
social criticism is contradicted by its covert advocacy of a social status
quo. The narrator's description of Witla's picture of the garbage collector exposes how easily the signifiers of social criticism can be used to
serve the opposite purpose. According to the narrator's description, this
picture represents
a great hulking, ungainly negro, a positively animal man, his ears thick
and projecting, his lips fat, his nose flat, his cheek bones prominent, his
whole body expressing brute strength and animal indifference to dirt and
cold.... He was looking purblindly down the shabby street, its hard crisp
snow littered with tin cans, paper, bits of slop and offal. Dust - gray ash
dust, was flying from the upturned can. (G 236)
Witla's painting is presented to the reader in a doubly mediated form:
the visual signifier is translated into verbal ones, and the reader can
only look at the picture by reading it through the narrator's eyes. And
what we read is not so much naturalist social criticism but the representation of a social stereotype: we are confronted with the same picture of
social "Otherness" that Cowperwood imposed on Chicago's workers in
The Titan. In the narrator's description, the black man is an animalistic
creature, a brute, the incarnation of the Other, whose place is (and probably will be) in the decaying garbage of white America. If Witla's painting really articulates social criticism, the painting as signifier is given a
different twist in the narrator's discourse. If there is an indictment of
social conditions, it is relegated to the gaps of the text.
13 Rachel Bowlby, Just Looking: Consumer Culture in Dreiser, Gissing and Zola (New York
& London: Methuen, 1985) 124.
180
Sexualizing Power in Naturalism
Equally problematic are the narrator's comments that frame the description of the painting. To describe the creative production process, he
deploys the very metaphors of power that are used in The Titan to characterize the speculator's exploitation of the Chicagoan people. The narrative voice, for instance, celebrates Eugene's critique of contemporary
power relations by linguistically reinscribing the master-slave dialectics
on Eugene's own artistic production process: "Eugene was so cruel in
his indictment of life. He seemed to lay on his details with bitter lack of
consideration. Like a slavedriver lashing a slave he spared no least shade
of his cutting brush" (G 236). The contextual framework signals a parodic twist: it is Eugene himself who is a labourer-slave, driven by his
work. At the same time, however, Eugene's creative production
reinscribes a master-slave relationship with the painter in a position of
mastery and control, while the marginalized subject of his painting becomes objectified and appropriated into the capitalist machinery. It is
significant that later in the novel when Eugene becomes marginalized
himself (he falls sick and loses his fortune), he is no longer capable of
painting. Witla's creation suggests very little solidarity with the
marginalized subject; rather, on the canvas, Witla ritually exorcizes and
externalizes the sense of Otherness that haunts the artist.
While Witla's art expresses sadness about the victims inevitably produced by capitalism, underneath its motifs of the margins his painting
also affirms progress, movement, change, and growth, in short, the very
ingredients of capitalism: "The paradox of a decaying drunkard placed
against the vivid persistence of life gripped his fancy. Somehow it suggested to himself hanging on, fighting on, accusing nature" (G 729). The
picture of the drunkard, significantly, accuses an abstract "nature," not
a unjust social system. As the "priest" of the new aesthetics of ugliness,
Witla celebrates the city in his paintings as an oxymoron, as beauty in
ugliness. Maybe shocking at first sight, the naturalist art of Witla's pictures is by no means in radical opposition to, or subversive of, capitalism, but can be easily appropriated by the capitalist machinery, as The
"Genius" demonstrates. Just as Cowperwood is obsessed with purchasing art in The Financier and The Titan, so Witla's rich customers use the
new art as decorations, transforming them into signifiers of what they
themselves stand for and what they would like to promote. This is reflected in the deliberate incongruity of the painting portraying a drunkard fetching a record price of eighteen thousand dollars (G 729). One of
the first paintings Witla sells, for the wholesome sum of $500, depicts
three engines and a railroad yard and sells to the vice-president of one
of the great railroads entering New York.
Naturalism's Specula(riza)tion: The "Genius"
181
Even more importantly, it is a sense of homoeroticized male solidarity that bonds the speculator and the artist. Cowperwood is associated
with the principle of fetishized accumulation, and so is Dreiser's (as
well as traditional French) naturalism. Just as Cowperwood is obsessed
with the pleasure of searching for, acquiring, and incorporating into a
collection precious objets d'art, so Dreiser's naturalism textually mimics
capitalism's collectomania and fetishistic obsession with material objects and facts by indulging in long narrative catalogues, repetitions,
and accumulation of similar scenes and stock characters (the doubling
and tripling of seduction and desertion scenes, of mistresses and wives).
Where Cowperwood collects works of art and women in an effort at an
adequate aesthetic representation of his variable body of power, the naturalist author textually participates in this sexualized collectomania by
indulging in descriptive accumulations and verbal hyperbole, in what
Emily Apter has called rhetorical fetishism. Similarly, William Berg has
noted that, although one might expect a reduction of rhetorical figures
in naturalism ("since these devices appear to be ultraliterary, blatantly
artificial, highly ornamental"), naturalist fiction in fact shows a profusion of tropes such as metaphor, metonymy, and synecdoche, which are
privileged because they lend themselves to visual representation: "Zola's
figuration displays decidedly visual contents, mechanisms, and relationships, thus leading naturally to an exploration of the workings of the
visual imagination."14
The visual imagination is inevitably bound to the sexual world, and
it is in their sexual politics - in the long "galleries of women" - that
Dreiser's artist and his speculator insist on defending a biologically
"natural" and the psychologically "normal" expression of male sexuality. Dreiser's fiction conceptualizes male power in terms of sexual promiscuity; womanizing is a characteristic common to both the naturalist
artist and the speculator. Like Cowperwood's speculative genius, Eugene
Witla's productive gift is linked to a whole "gallery of women" (from
Margaret Dunn and Ruby Kenny to Angela Blue, Christina Channing,
Frieda Roth, Carlotta Wilson, and Suzanne Dale). Womanizing not only
creates a sense of male complicity, it creates a network of male power
that is integral to the world of Dreiser's naturalism and that is supported
by its aesthetic form and narrative manipulations. Naturalism's complicity with the male character's womanizing is reflected in its own
fetishized obsession with classifying, systematizing, and hierarchizing
14 William Berg, The Visual Novel: Emile Zola and the Art of His Times (State College, PA:
Pennsylvania State UP, 1992) 212-13.
182
Sexualizing Power in Naturalism
specularized females. Supported by the narrative desire for taxonomical
order, Cowperwood, for instance, professes to have a very clear notion
of the hierarchy of art (and women). His hierarchy implicitly suggests
the protagonist's teleological "growth" or "progress," as he moves
through the different levels of the hierarchy. This, in turn, legitimizes
his right to abandon one lover after the next, or to replace one painting
with a better one, in order to move closer to an artistic "ideal." Donald
Pizer as well as Lawrence Hussman have taken Cowperwood's "hierarchy" at face value, Pizer arguing that the women in The Titan are art
objects in "an ascending order," and Hussman even recognizing underlying "religious dimensions" in Cowperwood's "mystical search" for
the feminine ideal.15
Hussman's "transcendental" interpretation, however, seems in contradiction to Pizer's more convincing point on the "picaresque" quality
of the novel, a quality that is reflected in the long line of often interchangeable mistresses, whose names are accumulated and catalogued
in the narrative without ever attaching themselves as separate personalities in the mind of the reader, so that the novel also parodically undercuts the notion of Cowperwood's and Eugene's sexual, spiritual, or
artistic "growth." In fact, the classification and cataloguing of different
types of women in the course of Cowperwood's life corresponds to naturalism's predilection for the bordello's "pile-up" effect, as Emily Apter
has identified it in the nineteenth-century French realist novel: "The fact
that the juxtaposition of disparate nationalities, sensual temperaments,
and body types characterizes artistic collection and bordello interior
alike," writes Apter, "only reinforces the epistemological connection
between the two species of cabinet."16
Focusing on Cowperwood's womanizing, The Titan reveals similar
contradictions that unravel the genre's male bias from within. The narrator, for instance, states that Cowperwood's promiscuity implies disruption and excess:
As has been said, this promiscuous attitude on Cowperwood's part was
the natural flowering out of a temperament that was chronically promiscuous, intellectually uncertain, and philosophically anarchic. (T 201)
The narrator's (manipulative) comment thus makes an implicit connection between Cowperwood's womanizing and naturalism's "entropic
15 Pizer, Novels, 173; Hussman, Theodore Dreiser, 85-86.
16 Apter 53.
Naturalism's Specula(riza)tion: The "Genius"
183
vision." But while Dreiser's authorial voice conceptualizes male sexual
promiscuity in terms of anarchy and disruption, the text itself frequently
demonstrates the opposite: other (more conservative) businessmen also
take their "human pleasure secretly" (T 8). Indeed, as Lois Banner's social
history reveals, male promiscuity amongst America's business elite was
not antibourgeois, but rather the bourgeois norm: "In their memoirs," Banner writes, "members of New York high society protect their privacy, but
their indignation makes them unanimous on one issue: the men of their
class were not faithful to their wives." Banner illustrates her point with
the example of Caroline Astor, whose "husband spent much of his time
on his yacht entertaining chorus girls." Similarly, "Alva Vanderbilt, to
shame her husband, divorced him in New York on the grounds of adultery so that his infidelity would be publicly known."17 Considering this
social backdrop of "normalized" promiscuity and infidelity, the narrator's comments have to be seen as a clever manipulation of naturalism's
gender ideology. While readers have made much of Cowperwood's refusal to be hypocritical, the fact is that, like the other married capitalists,
he lies to and cheats on his wife Aileen in order to enjoy both the advantages of marriage and the thrill of extramarital adventures.
Conspiring to "normalize" male womanizing within the aesthetic and
ideological boundaries of naturalism, the male narrators and their womanizing characters engage in some "fictitious dealings" of their own to
convince the reader of the "naturality" of such male sexual politics. Although this male ethos is supported by the naturalist conventions, it
also creates uneasy contradictions, as The "Genius" demonstrates in its
exploration of Witla's relationship with his wife. Feeling entrapped in
his marriage, Eugene Witla is obsessed with what he claims to be physical overindulgence in his sexual relations with his wife Angela, a notion
the narrative voice supports:
He had no knowledge of the effect of one's sexual life upon one's work,
nor what such a life when badly arranged can do to a perfect art - how it
can distort the sense of color, weaken that balanced judgment of character
which is so essential to a normal interpretation of life. (G 246)
The word "normal" strikes a particularly false note in this quotation,
especially since earlier in the novel, Eugene's art - like Cowperwood's
business strategies - is celebrated for its disruption of "normal" perspectives and its emphasis on a deliberate foregrounding of disruptive
17 Banner 191.
184
Sexualizing Power in Naturalism
Otherness. Similarly odd and contradictory is the narrator's claim that
Eugene lacks "knowledge" of the pernicious effect of sexuality, since it
is Eugene himself who worries about the negative influence of his sex
life on his art (just as Cowperwood attributes his own social failure in
Chicago to Aileen's daring sexuality).18 This scene exposes how much
the promiscuous Eugene and the male narrator are in secret communion with each other to manipulate and convince the reader of the pernicious influence of a monogamous sexuality in which the woman insists
on her pleasure.
Finally, womanizing was the driving force not only for Cowperwood
and Witla but for Theodore Dreiser as well, as the sexual confessions of
his diaries indicate. Condoned, legitimized, and even celebrated by the
male narrative voice, this principle of fetishized accumulation of women
as sexual and epistemological objects is both a logical expression of naturalism's male power politics and a space that exposes its gender bias,
deconstructing its claims to "objectivity" and "naturality." The pleasure
of womanizing and of masculinizing the genre inevitably unravels naturalism's in-built structures of male solidarity and male power. Dreiser's
naturalism is a "male club," in which a woman's appearance places her
almost automatically into the bordello's I'heteroclite. Yet, oscillating between anarchy and convention, between chaotic excess and obsessional
taxonomical order, the naturalist speculator and the "specularizing"
naturalist cannot help but expose the eroticization of male power in their
naturalist club. In its politics of male promiscuity, then, Dreiser's naturalism inevitably deconstructs itself, showing that the (homo)eroticized
male complicity relies on its subjugation (and, perhaps, its continued
fear) of the female body.
18 Some readers have been quick to note these contradictions. See, for example, Philip
Gerber's reaction to this passage in Theodore Dreiser: "To ask a reader to accept this
nonsense, in the face of Cowperwood, to whom sex was an essential spur to full
living, is asking a good deal indeed. But it is asking much more to swallow it in the
face of Dreiser's own life which, if we are to believe the legends he himself inspired,
directly refutes everything he says about Eugene" (119).